Naismith’s Choices on Race, From Basketball’s Beginnings

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CreditCreditThe New York Times

By Michael Beschloss

May 2, 2014

At the end of a week in which the Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling became, for a moment, the most talked-about man in basketball, let’s rewind the historical videotape and remember the Canadian-born farmer-chaplain-physician who invented the game. Here is James Naismith in 1928, holding a peach basket for his wife, Maude, to make a shot. Naismith seems now like an anachronistic figure, yet even nearly a century ago he too had to make serious choices about issues like race and money in basketball.

Orphaned in 1870 at 9 when his parents died of typhoid fever, Naismith, who played various sports at McGill in Montreal, obtained a theology degree but decided “there were other ways of influencing young people than preaching” and decamped for the Y.M.C.A. training school in Springfield, Mass. (now home of the Basketball Hall of Fame, which is named for him).

There during the long winter of 1891, to divert rambunctious students bored with calisthenics, Naismith worked to devise a “game that would be interesting and could be played indoors.” It was inspired in part by rugby, which was then widely popular — without the tackling, which he thought would be too dangerous on a hardwood floor. He found two peach baskets, nailed them high on opposite walls of the gymnasium gallery, grabbed a soccer ball and scrawled out 13 rules for his new game, which were typed up on two pages. Naismith insisted, for instance, that players “cannot run with the ball,” which “may be batted in any direction with one or both hands (never with the fist).” Intrigued as they watched Naismith’s game played, female colleagues promptly organized a women’s team.

When a “basket ball” exhibition was performed at the New York Y.M.C.A. in April 1892, the sport got its first mention in The New York Times: “A New Game of Ball, A Substitute for Football Without its Rough Features.”

Naismith acquired a medical degree (he once eccentrically tinkered with a machine that might stretch infants to make them taller as adults); the University of Kansas hired him as both physical education and chapel director. After fighting for decades to make basketball an Olympic sport, he finally got to hand a gold medal to a United States team at the 1936 Games in Berlin. (Naismith’s travel to Hitler’s capital was paid for in part by fans’ donations of a penny from each basketball ticket sold during one week the previous February.)

Naismith’s biographer Rob Rains recalls the older Naismith’s “strong feelings against segregation,” dating to his World War I-era service in France and on the United States-Mexico border. The record shows that he strove for progress, but through modest steps. He would not or could not get African-Americans onto Kansas’ varsity Jayhawks during the 1930s. But he did help to engineer the admission of black students to the university’s swimming pool. Up to then, they had been given automatic passing grades on a required swimming test without entering the pool so that it could remain all-white.

Naismith also served as a mentor to his student John McLendon, who ultimately became the first black coach in professional basketball — for George Steinbrenner’s 1961 Cleveland Pipers. In 1944, McClendon coached the all-black basketball team of the North Carolina College for Negroes — now North Carolina Central University — to victory in its “secret game” against an all-white Duke Medical School squad, defying the state’s segregation laws, behind locked doors, with no crowd.

McLendon later insisted that Naismith “didn’t know anything about color or nationality” and added, “Everything I ever did when I was coaching, I can trace back to him.”

As for money, Naismith might conceivably have patented his basketball invention and become a very rich man, but he had no passion for financial gain. He would no doubt be astounded by the big-money world of today’s game, of which one example stands out: In December 2010, 71 years after Naismith’s death, those two early yellowed pages of 13 basketball rules he wrote in 1891 were auctioned by Sotheby’s for $4.3 million, which was called the largest price ever for a piece of sports history. The document will be displayed in an $18 million University of Kansas sports complex whose groundbreaking was today.

Michael Beschloss, a presidential historian and author of nine books, is a contributor to The Upshot, which covers politics, policy and everyday life at nytimes.com/upshot.